When I was a little kid, my father coming home from work was an event we looked forward to every day. We’d all follow him, Mom, my brother Michael, and me, into the bedroom and watch him take his clothes off. First he’d take off his shirt—he always wore a white undershirt that he never removed—then his pants. He wore white Jockey underwear. The long ones. I don’t think they were called boxer briefs then but they are now. He didn’t buy his own underwear and Mom didn’t buy it for him. His mother, Grandma Lenore, sent them. (At the end of every visit, when we were all saying goodbye, Grandma Lenore would ask Mom, “Does Scott need shorts?”) After wearing them at work all day, they would be baggy, the leg openings too wide for his legs. He never wore short pants or a bathing suit in the summer, so his legs were white as paper. He took the change out of his pockets before he hung his work pants on a hook in his closet; he stacked nickels and dimes in two separate piles, and if there were pennies he’d give them to me or Michael or split them between us. I don’t remember how many years this evening ritual went on. I can’t imagine my dad letting us watch him undress past the age of five or six. But it’s like a lot of things you recall after many years; you can’t remember if it was every day, or only the one time, or something in between.
Fifty or so years later, when Mom was so sick that last year of her life and I was staying with my parents longer and more often than I ever had before as an adult, more than once my dad came into the guest room in the middle of the night and woke me up because Mom was in pain and he had called 911. He would have thrown a shirt on over his underwear but not buttoned it, his round belly obscuring the waistband of his briefs—I made the same transition from boxers to briefs some time in my forties—and his soft, sagging breasts with a few dark hairs around each distended nipple shocked me because I had never seen my father’s body and because it was so familiar. One of my final memories of my mother is from the day before her death when a home nurse was with her on the couch in the study, taking her vital signs and checking to make sure the port on her chest, through which by then she was getting all her nutrition intravenously, was working properly. The nurse was struggling with Mom’s shirt and Mom smiled like, Well I guess it doesn’t really matter much at this point, does it? and pulled her shirt up exposing her breasts, which were not flat like I had imagined an old woman’s breasts would be, but full, hanging to her waist but round with large nipples I hadn’t seen since I was about one year old and certainly didn’t remember. On very hot days in the summer in Indianapolis when we were all young, to cool off Mom would roll her top up just high enough to expose the underside of her bra. Her pants would hide her navel, making her upper abdomen a smooth, unbroken surface, flat but soft and matte and the palest pink. I have that skin, but my stomach is not flat anymore. I have my father’s body and my mother’s skin.
~
Fifteen or twenty years ago, years before Mom died, Dad wrote a short memoir; he titled it “History as I Remember It” and organized it in sections by the houses he lived in. Long paragraphs describe his relationships with cars and motorcycles and model airplanes. He swoons over his favorite pizza parlor in Waukegan, but my older brother is mentioned only in passing. My sister and I are nowhere to be seen. But his detailed account of his childhood with his father makes up for those later omissions. One gets the sense that calling up and cataloging all the years of leaving and returning and leaving and not returning, uprooting, landing, all the chaos and disruption, left him very little psychic energy for the rest of the story.
1933–39, 612 Lafayette St., Winona, MN
I was born in Winona Hospital and went to live in a small house across the tracks from the Milwaukee Railroad depot and train yard. [. . .] Many of my most vivid memories of this time had to do with the activities in the railroad yards. A great number of the trains were still pulled by steam locomotives. Winona was a major servicing stop for the Milwaukee Railroad south of the Twin Cities, which meant that every train passing through stopped so the locomotives could be loaded with coal and water. A lot of activity took place all in one small area, with the locomotives being uncoupled so they could be switched off to the service tracks and then back out to be coupled to the train and then back onto the main line and out onto the through track. [. . .] Passenger trains were arriving and departing, cars were being loaded and shuffled around, with little concern over who was wandering around. Railroad workers would let us know when to get out of the way, but never actually ran us off. [. . .] On a real red-letter day, I would have been invited to ride in the steam engine cab from the depot to the coal tower or water tank.
The Great Depression was still not over. A popular gathering point for the hoboes was an area just across the street from our house where blocks of limestone from the quarries outside of town were stored ready to be loaded on the train cars. The blocks were huge and were conveniently stacked so there was room for the hoboes to make their shelters. They always had a fire going and had food being prepared. I spent many hours sitting and listening to them talk, mostly about where there might be work available and how life was going for the folks back home. Frequently one or two of them would come over to our house, knock on the back door (always the back door), and ask if there were any small jobs they could do in exchange for handouts of food. They were always honest and friendly. They were just unemployed men riding the freight trains around the country looking for work. [. . .] I often stayed long after dark to listen to the stories the men told. [. . .] It seems obvious to me now that I must have received very little supervision at home, considering my age.
My father, who is not a talker, has told this story in one form or another, usually after a big holiday meal and a few glasses of wine, so many times that my siblings and I joke about “Dad’s hoboes.” His eyes get shiny and unfocused when he tells this story. I’ve only seen strong emotion other than irritation or anger in my father’s face one other time. During the last few weeks of my mother’s life, I stayed at my parents’ house. I hadn’t spent so much time alone with my father since I was about 12. He and I, and my brother and sister, didn’t know it yet, couldn’t see it, couldn’t let ourselves, but Mom was dying. Dad and I would come home together from long days at the hospital, I’d make us some dinner, and we’d sit at the kitchen table across from each other and eat, drink wine, and search our brains for things to talk about. One night I grilled some sausages for us with red peppers and onions and he opened a bottle of his favorite wine—his favorites have always been full-bodied California reds—and the sausages were juicy and spicy and we were both exhausted and everything was just perfect, and the wine and being there with Dad, and he looked up at me and said, “Are you feeling what I’m feeling?” and I said, “Yeah.” I have no idea what he was feeling but at the time I must’ve thought I did. Another night, much closer to the end, the fear and pain in his face was torture to sit there and look at, and I said, “Dad, I feel like I need to say out loud how awful and scary this is. But we’ll all get through it together,” and his eyes filled with tears and he mumbled, “56 years,” which is how long he and my mother were married. There was a pause, and then we both picked up our forks and finished eating.
The hobo story, if I trust my father’s recollection, took place when he was under six. If he was, as he says, so often unsupervised, it’s unclear to me whether his mother, my grandmother Lenore, was overwhelmed, distracted, uninterested, or otherwise occupied. Much of his father’s, my grandfather Edward Cheslik’s, behavior is also mysterious, but it’s clear that he was restless and that he drank.
1939–43 526 W. Broadway St. Winona, MN
[. . .] Our house was situated on a sharp bend in the street—about 30 degrees—that made any cars coming down the street easily visible. We owned a new ’41 Studebaker just before the war started. It was one of the few cars then with the headlights set wide in the fenders, unlike most cars of the time, which had them set high on the side of the hood and much closer together—so it was easily recognized from a distance. My mother would sit in the front window and watch for my father to come home after the bars closed. That was when the fights would start. That changed when the war started [. . .]. Earlier closing hours were legislated for the bars and the buses stopped running at 11:00 p.m., so the nightly schedule was moved up a couple hours and I got more sleep.Grandma Lenore had all her teeth pulled just before she retired, at 65, so her insurance would cover it. At 70, she bought a burial plot next to her daughter Jane’s grave in a cemetery in St. Paul and had the stone inscribed “Ego Amo Te.” She died at 97. After a quick memorial service at the cemetery two years later—we’d waited until the whole family, Mom and Dad, my brother Michael and his partner Sandy, my sister Kay, Dad’s Minnesota cousins Deb and Jill, and I, could make the trip to St. Paul together—we lowered Grandma’s ashes in their urn into the neat, square hole dug by cemetery workers that morning and went to a nearby pub for lunch. I sat next to Dad, and I remember two things he said to me. The whole table had got onto the subject of TV commercials for toilet paper, and my father, nearly under his breath, said that the only thing you need to know about a brand of toilet paper is how easily your finger will push through it, and I thought that was, as far as I could remember, the most intimate thing he had ever shared with me, and then later, more or less out of the blue, he said, “When she would call on the phone, she’d talk to me for a minute at the most and then ask to speak to your mother. She didn’t have ten words to say to me.”
I want to believe that Grandma Lenore did the best she could under the circumstances. What constituted her best, I don’t know. When I was little, if she was in a good mood Grandma Lenore and I could chat all afternoon, or as long as she’d put up with me. My relationship with my father until recently was mostly made of uncomfortable silence and him disappearing to the basement to work on his model airplanes and make small talk in Morse Code with people on the other side of the world.
~
Ed had two sisters, both younger. My father says that his grandmother, Ed’s mother, Frances Katula Cheslik, used to say, in order to explain, or excuse, Ed’s alcoholism—and, it seems to me, to suggest, though no one would have said it explicitly, that his alcoholism was, or at least stood in for or included, his homosexuality—that Ed was the way he was because “he grew up in a house full of girls.”
~
The pattern was that Ed would bring someone, a man, a friend, someone from work, home some evening and then again and then for several days this man would be around the house until one morning he and Ed would be gone and the bank account would be empty. Ed was a linotype operator. A linotype machine was a huge, terrifying apparatus consisting of a typewriter-like keyboard and some kind of mechanism that turned the typed letters and words and paragraphs into pages cast in molten lead that were used to print newspapers. Operating one was a specialized task requiring strength and speed and accuracy, it was a union job, and, as Grandma Lenore used to tell us, because of this skill Ed could get a job anywhere he ended up because every town had a newspaper, a statement which I think was meant to say that Ed was a good provider, but that also seems close to an admission of the instability of their life. When Ed would disappear, Lenore would call his union to find out where he had taken a job—Grandma Lenore was not accustomed to taking no for an answer—and she’d follow him there and bring him back to Winona. I don’t know how many times this happened, but enough that my father used the word “pattern” and Dad is the only one left now who can remember and describe those days. Desire being persistent and powerful, I would guess the pattern extends back before Dad’s conscious memories and even before that: Lenore and Edward were married in 1927, and Dad wasn’t born until 1933.
1946–49 700 E. 5th St. Winona, MN [Ed and Lenore bought a tavern and lived in the apartment upstairs.]
[Sometime in 1948] my father was committed to a rehab program at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester. [. . .] During his absence my mother ran the bar and we then found out just how profitable the bar had been all the years we were there. Much money had been lost by my father indulging his drinking habit. Of course, when he came home, he offered no thanks for my mother having operated the bar and making it profitable. The first thing he did was sell the bar, empty the bank account, and disappear with all the money from the sale.We continued to live in the apartment above the bar until word arrived several months later via the linotype operator’s union that he was in Albert Lea, working for the newspaper there. Naturally, we packed up and joined him.
They’d been in Albert Lea for less than a year when a printer friend of Ed’s showed up one evening, and the next morning he and Ed were gone with no goodbye. The printer had said that he heard there were high-paying newspaper jobs in Milwaukee and that that’s where he was headed. Lenore persuaded a man who knew Ed from work, a man who had recently arrived in town on a motorcycle holding a dog (the dog does not appear again, but it’s a detail my father never leaves out when he tells this story), to drive her to Milwaukee, along with Dad who was a junior in high school and “everything we didn’t leave behind.” A woman alone with a teenage son in the 1940s, deserted by her husband, had to be, or become, good at getting men to do things she needed done. (My father has more than once referred to his mother as a “con artist.” He meant it as a compliment.) When they got to Milwaukee, no one at the newspaper had heard of Ed and his printer friend. The drive had taken all day and most of the night and now this man was 400 miles from home in front of a newspaper office, the sun was coming up, and an abandoned woman he barely knew, and her son, were sitting in his car surrounded by all their earthly possessions. Lenore got him to drive them down the shore of Lake Michigan and stop in every town at every newspaper on the way until they found Ed in Waukegan, just over the border into Illinois. There the man emptied his car onto the sidewalk in front of the Madison Hotel, where Ed was staying, next door to the newspaper, turned around, and drove home.
These printer buddies and work pals and other assorted men that blew into town, the men Ed disappeared with, these men that Ed seemed to try to start something with, a situation, a life elsewhere—who were they? Homosexual men in that era were attracted to jobs that required some traveling, some anonymity away from home: salesman, reporters. A gay man might have a better chance of meeting someone similarly inclined, someone looking, in the newspaper business than in other lines of work. It’s a stretch to attribute Ed’s choice of vocation to the prospect of meeting men. His father was a newspaper man. Ed probably just followed in his footsteps. Or maybe Ed had big dreams he wouldn’t shut up about and his father sat him down and said, “Son, don’t be a fool. Get a job.” But it’s not far-fetched to imagine it a happy coincidence. Some gay men in the early and middle decades of the twentieth century communicated through correspondence clubs, maintained cross-country friendships, often involving sex, introduced men they’d met to other men they’d met, and so on. No one will ever know how extensive they were, but these spontaneous networks were one way that gay men found each other. Was Ed a letter writer? Were his disappearances plotted and then foiled, over and over?
I resist the fantasy that if he and the man he escaped with had been left alone, if his wife had not hunted him down and destroyed the possibility of whatever it was he intended to do or create, he would have lived happily ever after. Seeing these events solely from the point of view of my father, an old man assessing a childhood that was battered and uprooted time and time again with no time to recover in between, Ed’s “pattern” looks more like thrashing than planning, more like fleeing than dreaming. More like pain than love. But yearning, nevertheless.
~
When Ed left Winona with his friend and made his way down the river and then down the shore of Lake Michigan from Milwaukee to Racine to Waukegan, where Lenore caught up with him, was he on his way to Chicago less than 50 miles farther down the lake? A visible gay nightlife flourished in Chicago during the Prohibition 1920s, and we know from Kinsey’s research that even into the repressive era that followed, a large, if much more secretive and underground, gay community persisted. Kinsey estimated Chicago’s queer population at 300,000 in the 1940s. Did Ed know that? Did Lenore? I’ve found no evidence of that knowledge or desire, but that kind of evidence has often been destroyed, burned, hidden, buried, disguised by family members, by historians, by institutions, after the death of someone gay. Even if he hadn’t been headed to Chicago to find his kindred, he may have found them there inadvertently if he’d been allowed to continue his journey.
In Waukegan, Grandma got a job with the Great Lakes Naval Center, Dad finished high school and took a job there, too, then went to college for two years at Stout State College, dropped out when he ran out of money, met my mother in a neighboring farm town when he was 22 and she was 16, got drafted and spent two years in the army. When he got out, they married, and within two years both my brother and I were born. We lived in Waukegan until I was three and my brother was four, when we moved to Indianapolis. Ed did not stop disappearing but Lenore stopped chasing him. Still, he always, eventually, returned, until one time, probably in 1961, he left for good. Grandma Lenore stayed in Waukegan for nearly 30 years, depending on no one.
Until I told my parents I was gay and my father told me about his father, I didn’t know about Lenore’s volatile marriage and those precarious years. She was my eccentric, independent Grandma Lenore who lived downtown, spent her mornings painting, her afternoons window shopping, coffee and a hamburger at the “dime store” lunch counter. She recognized and encouraged the artist in me. She told me we were “city people.” I wanted to live like her; I wanted to be her. I knew nothing then about disappointment, nothing about the gap between what you dreamed and where you ended up. When I looked at her life, I saw freedom.
~
I think of this 31-page typed single-spaced document, “History as I Remember It,” that my mother printed out for me shortly before she died (“Did you know your dad wrote a memoir?”) as the definitive version of these stories, but who’s to say? My siblings and I smile behind his back when Dad starts talking. Here come the hoboes again. We listen to his stories skeptically—does a five-year-old really stroll across the street and hang out with hoboes all day? The house on Lafayette St. in Winona across from the trainyard is still there, plain as day on Google Street View. The trainyard too, and the depot. Dad is the only one who remembers now, but in his memoir he wrote, “When we arrived in Milwaukee and checked in at the newspaper, no one had ever heard of dear old dad or his friend,” but on the phone yesterday he told me, “We talked to some of the people at the newspaper there and they said ‘Well, he headed south toward Racine.’” Both can’t be true. And in one version he said that the man on the motorcycle with the dog had to wait to drive them to Milwaukee until his wife arrived with their car. In another, there is no wife; the man bought the car in Winona. These are small discrepancies, but there are many. I look to these stories of my father and my grandfather to tell me who I am, and they are full of holes.
There is one discrepancy, however, that is as persistent as tinnitus in my brain. In the story, the way Dad told it to me after I came out, my grandfather Edward Cheslik disappears, over and over, and Grandma Lenore hunts him down and finds him with a man. Always the same man. I came to think of him as Grandpa Ed’s boyfriend. But early last year I spent a weekend with my father in the house he shared with my mother before she died, that he shares now with his dog Pokey—the second Pokey, named after the first Pokey, who died a few years before Mom—and as we dug out folders and boxes and pored over photo albums, and he recalled his father’s many disappearances, he told me that when they would track down my grandfather they’d always find him with a man. I asked, “Do you know who the man was or anything about him?” and he said, “It wasn’t one man, it was always a different man.” There were lots of men.
Do I so strongly prefer the one-man hypothesis because it’s romantic: a love that persists no matter how many times you hunt it down and throw it to the curb, one true love that survives with the whole world and human history aligned against it? Winona, Minnesota was built on the site of a Dakota Indian village, and the legend of Winona, from which the city takes its name, is an old Indian lover’s leap story: true love or death. Or is it because I have needed, ever since I learned that my grandfather was gay, to see that fact, his love of men, in the world, and it’s much easier to conjure an image of one mouth, one set of eyes, hands, one laugh, than a dozen or a hundred? On the other hand, Winona’s early big industries were steamboats and the railroad. One of the first rail bridges across the Mississippi was built in Winona. Coming and going, moving on. I’ve had more than one love. I’ve had four big ones and dozens, hundreds, in between. I stopped using the expression “love of my life” sometime in my forties. There’s romance too in leaving, steamboats and trains and vanishing and reappearing somewhere else, brand new. I’m 63 now, almost four years older than Edward was when he crawled under a tractor trailer to sleep and die. If there’s any lesson in it, it’s that you can only leave so many times until it’s best to stay.
~
Arizona Daily Star, June 1, 1965
Autopsy Ordered in Transient’s Death: A 59-year-old transient was found dead underneath a trailer at 3255 S. Fourth Avenue in South Tucson yesterday. Sergeant Fernando Romero said the man had apparently crawled under the trailer to sleep. Officers found a Minnesota driver’s license on his person, when the body was discovered about 3:30 p.m. Romero said no foul play was suspected, but an autopsy was ordered for today. The body was taken to Tucson Mortuary.
Edward Cheslik’s obituary in the Winona Daily News says he had a heart attack. On his death certificate, “Arteriosclerotic heart disease” is typed in the blank for “Cause of Death,” and question marks for “Address” and “Length of Stay.” Something the police found in his wallet listed his younger sister Sylvia as next of kin, so she was notified and she flew to Tucson to identify his body and have him buried. No one in the family, that I know of, has ever mentioned why he was in Tucson, how he got there, or what he might have been doing between his final disappearance in 1961 and when he was found dead under a truck four years later. My father doesn’t know and seems, insofar as my father can be read, uninterested in finding out. Did he go straight there for some particular reason, or did he take a meandering path and Tucson was just the end of the road?
I found a granddaughter of Sylvia Cheslik on Ancestry.com, and I sent her a message asking if she had heard any family stories about my grandfather. She had not, but she contacted her aunt (Sylvia’s daughter), who replied that “Ed just kind of disappeared. It wasn’t talked about in the family.” She recalled that Sylvia flew to Tucson alone and that she and the minister were the only ones at the funeral. My mother told me that soon after I was born in 1961, and just before he disappeared for good, my grandfather visited her and my dad in Waukegan and that he held me as a baby. There are no photos and I have no memory of it.
xxx
